


Robin Hood and Little John Walking Through the Forest

by scioscribe



Category: The Red Tree - Caitlín R. Kiernan
Genre: F/F, Ghosts, Horror, POV Second Person, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-20 23:36:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16565276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Amanda sees it coming.





	Robin Hood and Little John Walking Through the Forest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tristesses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/gifts).



Your name is not Amanda.

It takes a special kind of hubris to steal a person’s name from them, doesn’t it?  Sarah used to brag to you about the fossil named in her honor— _Griffithides croweii_ —and when you were in the mood to be a cunt, you’d tell her how sad you think it is when people repeat their boasts over and over.  They might as well be tapping out the ashes from their cigarette and saying, in the same tone of voice, “I haven't done that much with my life.”  You said that to her in a Chinese restaurant, a cracked fortune cookie lying on the table between you.  A bad metaphor.  Sarah liked bad metaphors, or so the critics always said.

The thing about Sarah is that she’s so raw all over that you can’t touch her without hurting her.  So you start to think you might as well hurt her on purpose—fuck, at least then you won’t be confused all the time about what you’ve done wrong.  But being a bitch gets to be a habit.

And that’s all a ghost is.  A habit.  And like habits, ghosts have to be had by someone.  You’re had by Sarah Crowe—and you get the bitterest kick out of that, because just the fact that you’re still around means she didn’t break you after all.  She lived, but you won.

That’s some consolation when you’re kicking around the hell of her heart, saddled with a name that isn’t yours, with a face that she remembers imperfectly.

There are things you could tell Sarah, if she would listen.

She used to taste like cigarettes and beer and black coffee, like a bowling alley.  You would stand behind her, your arms around her waist.  You could feel the brackets of her spine with your nose: she smelled like she tasted and that was the only way she was honest.  You used to know every imperfect part of her, from the knee-to-ankle birthmark on one side of her left leg (“That’s how you’ll identify me,” she said, “when they find my headless body in the river,” always prepared for contingencies, Sarah) to the slight roughness of the backs of her hands in the winter.  You knew all the physical details of her.  The exact shade of the blue of her veins.  You created her picture what felt like hundreds of thousands of times; you debauched it with centaurs and tentacles and needles.

Your therapist said, “This isn’t love, Amanda, this is obsession.”

She didn’t call you Amanda, of course.

What obsession does is it tunes you to the wrong frequency.  Your reactions are governed by things no one else even picks up; you’re a dog twitching at inaudible whistles.  (Being a bitch gets to be a habit.) 

You sleep with the woman who owns the sushi restaurant in Buckhead for, you tell Sarah in that last fight, a lot of reasons.  The smell of fish on her hands makes you think of sex.  She isn’t unhappy—or she’s no unhappier than anyone else.  She’s easy even outside of bed.

She is as chilly and smoothly featureless as one of the giant refrigerators in her restaurant, and that is, after Sarah, simultaneously with Sarah, something that’s important to you, because you need a place to die.  You could do it in a motel, but then you’re leaving some poor housekeeper to find you.  There’s no twenty curled around the giveaway pen, weighed down with the water glass, that can make up for that.  At least with your lover, you’ve gotten her off a few times.  You’ve paid your way.

But mostly you sleep with her because when you first meet her—when she comes around to your table—she shakes your hand and you see a tattoo on the inside of her wrist.  A tree, drawn in red ink.

You are bleary-eyed from lack of sleep.  You spent the last three nights having your real affair—the brutal seduction of Sarah’s quiescent image, the reconfiguring of her into your dreams—and you feel fucked-out and sore.  Your fingers smell like your own wet cunt.

In the picture you made, your absolute fucking masterpiece, Sarah was unchanged except for these hairline cracks all over her—shattered Sarah pieced back together again, fervently and inexpertly—and you were a dryad, some monstrous Daphne.  You held her in place, your wild wooden fingers growing into her skin, puncturing her, penetrating her.  Your leaves crowning her hair.

You slathered a pomegranate tint over it all.  Unevenly applied, like bad lipstick: it made your brown eyes the color of clay-rich soil.  No one commissioned this, not even you.  You didn’t ask for it.  You didn’t want to be a ghost, a psychopomp, a liar, a dénouement, a fantasy.  A confusion of myths.  You didn’t ask to be Amanda.  _Revenant croweii._

Sarah insulted a lot about you, but never your work.  What’s really weird, really nauseatingly funny in a way, is that you used to dream she had.

 _You can’t stand me,_ you would say in these dreams, _because what I do makes me happy.  Maybe you make me miserable, maybe everything else in this whole fucking world makes me miserable, but I love what I do._

 _What you do._ In the dreams, Sarah looks somehow falsely younger, her skin pink and over-scrubbed like she’s had a chemical peel, and you want to tell her that of all the problems the two of you have, age isn’t one of them.  _What you do,_ Sarah repeats.  In the dream you know she’ll say this over and over again until you hear her; she’ll beat the words bloody against the wall of you.  _You’re a pimp of the grotesque_.

You laugh right in her face for thinking that’s even an insult.  _What does that make you, Sarah?  You must be one of my johns, then, because the first time I showed you everything I could do, your cunt got so soaked I could smell you through your jeans._

That’s true even if the rest of the dream is a lie.  You never had this conversation with Sarah, but you did thrust your fingers and stiff harnessed cock into her and feel her quiver around you, hot and tight and wet.  You’re not an expert at relationships.  Maybe this is what they are—filthy permutations of bodies, avoided collisions of mind.

Really, though, Sarah liked your work.  In the end, she liked it more than she liked you.

“We do the same thing,” she said once, really said, “you and me.  When I’m at my best.”

“What’s that?”

“Take something real,” Sarah murmured, “and split it into a thousand pieces, unstring the sinews of it, take what’s useful and dump the rest.  Put it together with what never really touched it.  Make something that could never be real.”

Of all the people you ever loved, she's the one you'd like to kill.  She made you into a story and you helped her.  You foreshadowed for her.  You filled up your hard drive with her future, with trees and death and sex and horror and red-eyed girls, and in the end, she looked away.  She always was a coward.

In the last dream you had, the night before you died, the two of you were in the woods.

 _Do you know the way out of here?_ you said.

 _So long as we keep the red tree to our left,_ Sarah said, _we can’t get lost._ Then she said something about the Latin for left being _sinistra_ , sinister, and how teachers used to beat kids to stop them from writing with their left hands.  You knew all that already.  In the dream her knuckles were red and swollen.

You said, _I didn’t know you were left-handed._

 _There is another shore,_ Sarah said, _upon the other side,_ and somehow from the way she was looking at you, you could tell that you were not really there.  (But then, you got that feeling a lot with Sarah.)  She was carrying something in her right hand.  Sometimes it was a little china figurine, a rabbit with its heart on the outside of its body, and sometimes it was a knife.  In her left, she had a red plastic container of gasoline.

Sarah said, _Out in open places there have been flows of a red liquid._

You followed her.  The way ghosts do.  You left your name behind you.


End file.
